Category Archives: Featured

I recently tried my hand at buying a previously-owned domain name. There was a domain that I had wanted for years, but it had already been taken. On a whim, I ran a whois search on it a couple weeks ago for some reason or another. I was surprised when I saw that it had expired back in November, and immediately began researching the domain name expiry process.

I found a good article on the subject, How to Snatch an Expiring Domain, from which I refreshed my memory on how the crazy business known as “Drop Catching” works. When a domain expires, it is marked as expired in VeriSign’s database. It remains in that deactivated state for forty days, unless the owner pays the usual fee to renew it. After that initial forty-day period is over, the owner still has a final chance to save the name before it is deleted, but they have to pay a $100 fee to do so. Seventy days after the expiration date, it’s status is changed to “locked” and it will be deleted from the ICANN database five days later during a three-hour window between 2:00pm and 5:00pm EST. As soon as it drops from the database, the name is available for registration.

GitHub is great for open source projects, but the lack of free private repositories can be limiting for projects that you would rather not be shared with the entire world. While it does make sense to pay for a tool if you use it…

Well, it’s been another year of blogging. 2011 was a pretty busy year for me, and I got a few fun projects done. Minimus, my free Mac application for easily compressing CSS and JavaScript, is one such thing. Anyway, now’s the time when I…

iOS has a simple event-based XML parser built in, which makes it fairly easy to do less involved parsing operations without having to load up a third-party framework. This tutorial will show you how to build a simple iPhone application that will download an…

Looking for some high-quality PSD resources? Maybe your design skills are lacking and you need some professional-quality elements for the theme you’re making for your blog. Or maybe you need some social media icons. Or maybe you’re just don’t feel like reinventing the wheel…

You may have heard that the old MySQL extension for PHP is going to eventually be deprecated in favor of the newer (and potentially more secure) MySQLi and PDO extensions. You’re going to need to update your old code sooner or later, so why…

Users like fast websites. That’s one of the universal rules of web development. To attain faster speeds, it’s common to use a process known as “minification” to compress the file size of JavaScript and CSS. Yahoo developed one of the most commonly-used tools for…

Both Twitter and Facebook have little JavaScript widgets that allow you to share a page using the respective service, displaying a running total of users who have done so. While that’s fine for most purposes, what if you just need the count, for some…

PHP gets a lot of flak for some of it’s strange idiosyncrasies. It’s lack of consistency about argument order (needle then haystack in str_replace, haystack then needle in strstr) and function names (stripslashes vs strip_tags) are particularly head-scratching examples. This partly comes from PHP’s…

Wouldn’t it be neat to have an at-a-glance display of common statistical information on your WordPress Dashboard? The StatDash plugin does exactly that, adding a customizable widget that shows stats from Google Analytics, Feedburner, Twitter and even your earnings from the Envato Marketplaces. You…